A large, bustling, salty yarn whose plot doesn’t withstand too much scrutiny. Overall, much less convincing than the...
Carver extends his established series about the star riggers, who navigate spaceships through the perilous region of space-time called the Flux. Rigger Renwald Legroeder, captured by the piratical Kyber seven years ago, makes a miraculous escape and returns to the Centrist World of Faber Eridani. His escape, along with his report—that the pirates are using the ghost ship Impris, lost in the Flux 124 years ago, as a lure—brings only hostility, accusations of complicity, and disbelief. Arrested, jailed, then released on bail, thanks to lawyer Harriet Mahoney—her grandson went missing on Legroeder’s ship when it was captured—Legroeder realizes he’s stumbled into a vast conspiracy to conceal the truth. The deception began a century ago, when the Centrist Worlds, at war with the Kyber, sold out their alien allies, the Narseil, in order to buy a precarious peace. The Narseil themselves mean to make the truth known, and intend to start by recovering Impris—whose crew, thanks to the weird time effects in the deep Flux, seem to be still alive. In order to find Impris, though, the Narseil need Legroeder’s help to contact the Kyber underground—not all Kyber agree with the Kyber’s piratical approach. But even if they do contact Impris deep in the Flux, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to get back out.
A large, bustling, salty yarn whose plot doesn’t withstand too much scrutiny. Overall, much less convincing than the author’s splendid Chaos Chronicles (The Infinite Sea, 1996, etc.).Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-85642-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A new edition of the by now classic collection of affiliated stories which has already established its deserved longevity.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1963
ISBN: 055338256X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1963
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